The
Atari video game burial was a 1983 mass burial of unsold
video game cartridges, consoles, and computers, undertaken by the American video game and home computer company
Atari, Inc., at a landfill site in the U.S. state of
New Mexico. The burial occurred amid the
video game crash of 1983, at the end of a disastrous fiscal year that saw Atari being sold off by its parent company
Warner Communications. It included 700,000 cartridges of various games, including unsold copies of
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), one of the
largest video game failures in history. For several decades after the burial was first reported, there were doubts as to its veracity and scope, and it was frequently dismissed as an
urban legend. In 2013 and 2014, an excavation was carried out by
Fuel Industries,
Microsoft, the New Mexico government and others, which revealed discarded games and hardware. Only a small fraction, about 1,300 cartridges, were recovered, with a portion reserved for curation and the rest auctioned to raise money for a museum to commemorate the burial. This photograph shows
packaging for cartridges of the video games
E.T. and
Centipede in situ at the excavation site.
Photograph credit: taylorhatmaker
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